When Junot Díaz was looking for a place to live that reminded him of his native Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, he chose Washington Heights, where he has lived since 1995. Díaz, whose 2007 novel “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, writes with a palpable passion and childlike romanticism for his homeland and the men and women who move from there to the States. That enchantment jumps off the pages of his new collection of short stories, “This Is How You Lose Her.” This is his Dominican New York.

1. The George Washington Bridge.

“I walk over to the George Washington Bridge at least three or four times a week. It is an extraordinary structure, and it connects my homes:New York City, Washington Heights and [the Dominican neighborhood where I grew up in] New Jersey. It’s just one of the most beautiful places. And what’s crazy is the bridge is undone. They ran out of money. The bridge was supposed to be covered in granite, but for economic reasons, and aesthetics, they left the granite off. I still remember when 9/11 happened. The morning of I was coming into New York City and I had to walk across that bridge and the bridge had to be shut down, so of course I just mixed in with the emergency personnel and walked over. You didn’t realize until you saw the smoke what a clear sight it gave you of the towers.”

“I moved back to New York in 1995, and that was the great, great moment for spoken word. People had this very strong, and perhaps delusional, sense that it spoke to all these lives in ways that nothing else was speaking to. We thought it was going to take its place up among the artistic practices. I had friends like [poets] Willie Perdomo and Staceyann Chin — it was an ill, beautiful time when we were all seeing each other. What was hilarious was I never performed. I was just a member of the crowd. And I remember the first time I published anything, they were like, ‘Yo, motherf–ker, you write?’ ”

3. Dunkin’ Donuts, 3851 Broadway, at 161st Street.

“I [write] there because that place is kind of like nonsense — loud and anonymous — and you can sort of hide in that. And I know it sounds ridiculously sentimental, but I find that Afro-Dominican thing reassuring. It’s a lot of local African-Americans, a lot of crazy Dominicans and every now and then a couple of kids from the [Columbia University] medical school. There is nothing like this place for the creation of weird, Dickensian characters. You will meet some straight-up oddballs there.”

“This is the go-to Dominican seafood restaurant. I always get the best — and the fastest, that’s important — snapper with coconut sauce, which is really poor man’s curry. [Back in the day], my boy Pedro would get a soup with, like, every kind of seafood. They said it was the original Viagra. The women who worked there were incredible — incredibly friendly, incredibly smart. They knew how to deal with everyone from a taxita to a cop, and they packed these guys in. After a long day of handing out fliers, there was nothing like Bobby’s Fish.”

“The Dyckman strip is what the young kids are calling the salami-packing district. I was at La Marina before people got caught drug dealing there. That used to be our old hangout spot. I still remember an ex-girlfriend of mine looking at me with these dead eyes and saying, ‘You are f – – king wack.” If you want to have an actual conversation, where you can hear people, there’s Corcho. I don’t even like wine, but it’s small, and comfortable. Mamajuana Cafe is the lynchpin of that area. That’s the spot that revitalized everything. My boy Lenny — he runs the spot — he does a really good job. And then there’s Agua. That’s the one place that, if any of my bad cousins are out [and about], I always run into them at Agua, usually with girls they’re not married to.”

“This is where my heart is these days. When I think what is the best new cultural place uptown, it’s Casa Azul. It’s the only Latino bookstore and it’s gorgeous, remarkable. It’s only been open a couple of months but it’s become my spot. You need to get over there.”

7. The Point Community Development Corporation, 940 Garrison Ave., at Manida Street, The Bronx.

“It’s a really important community center and artist space that a bunch of people in the South Bronx sort of claimed. Like, Error: Break shortcode syntax invalid Crazy Legs [of the Rock Steady Crew] was up there doing b-boy workshops. When I was going, there was this group of artists who were Puerto Rican and African-American called the Welfare Poets. One of my boys, Hector Rivera, was one of the founding members. It’s still up and going, but when we were there it was still a question of what The Point was. These days, everything’s identity is so fixed, everybody knows what [the] services [are] and what the space is for.But The Point back then, man, it was just a wonderful site folks coming together and doing really progressive s - – t.”